


Dirge Without Music

by Alona



Category: Kings
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-22
Updated: 2011-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-27 20:39:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/299828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alona/pseuds/Alona
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Vesper adjusts to new surroundings.  Silas is a terrible host and a worse guest.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dirge Without Music

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pinstripesuit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinstripesuit/gifts).



When Vesper woke, with the cold mustiness of earth in his nostrils and a hollowness behind his temples, he thought Silas had buried him alive. The aptness of that first impression would come to haunt him before long. The brown twilight around him resolved into an ascetic room with an earthen floor and stone walls, and an iron door, no doubt locked.

Movement was a struggle against invisible weights pressing on his limbs, but that, he decided, was only the drugs. A white plastic bottle of them stood on the tray that had been left on the floor beside his low cot, in easy reach. An ordinary pharmacy label was attached to it. The tray also held a mug of water, which he reached for; his mouth tasted worse than half a dozen hangovers. As he stretched, pain ripped through his right side, and he went limp as waves of nausea swept over him.

Broken ribs, he diagnosed. His arm, hanging off the cot, was mottled with bruises and scrapes. He vaguely remembered the hospital, and the explosion: the bomb in his command center, planted by a staffer Silas had turned against him. Multiple staffers, perhaps. The whole damn army by that point, for all he knew. The bomb had gone off early, throwing him clear rather than killing him. That must have been a messy little problem for Silas, he thought with a touch of cheer.

Bathed in cold sweat and holding his injured side as still as he could, he lowered himself into a crouch beside the cot. The floor met him with a stunning thump. Before he could reach for the mug, he had to disentangle the sheet that had wound around him on the way down. He spat his first mouthful of water onto the ground, gulped the rest, and for good measure swallowed two of the pills dry -- oxycodone, prescribed to one William Dunlevy, whoever he was.

He arranged himself in a poor approximation of comfort and waited for the drug to take effect. After a while he climbed back onto the cot.

It a timeless haze, he slept and woke, hobbled feebly around his prison, slept and woke again. It was a hollow pounding that woke him, and he found another tray had been pushed in through a flap in the door. The first tray still lay where it was; no one had entered the cell.

He rose with renewed protest from his ribs, his countless minor injuries shrieking in subdued chorus. The fresh tray held more water and a bowl of ambiguous foodstuffs. Despite its frankly unappetizing smell, it woke a ravenous hunger in him. He carried it to the plain table in the corner and scarfed down several spoonfuls before sickness roiled his guts, and he had to pause and wait for it to pass before going on more cautiously.

Time spun on in featureless chunks. There was nothing to do but heal and hate. For variety he recited scraps of remembered poetry. It was wonderful what could be dredged up, given enough time. He measured time by his periods of waking, and by the slow improvement in his condition. Twice he tried to talk to whoever brought his meals but received no response.

On the seventh day, give or take, Silas visited him.

Vesper was prepared to take the visit for a hallucination. What could be more likely, after all, than that it was a sign of incipient madness? This was his role now, and he should grow accustomed to it: a mad king locked in a dungeon. He would have preferred a tower. He would have preferred breaking Silas’s figmentary face.

“General Benjamin,” he said, seating himself at the table. “What a pleasant surprise.”

“How are you adjusting?” Silas asked. If it bothered him that Vesper had used his abandoned title, he didn’t show it. He had closed the door behind him, leaving his heavily armed escort outside. There was only one chair in the cell, and, anyway, Silas looked too tightly strung to sit.

“No doctors,” Vesper observed. “You can’t bring yourself to kill me while I’m down, but if nature took her course, you wouldn’t mind one bit.”

“Everything in working order, then,” said Silas, with assumed heartiness. He even reached across the table to clap Vesper on one shoulder. Probably real, then, Vesper decided, and accordingly studied his visitor.

There was no doubt but that Silas cut a fine figure: coal-black curls, straight dark brows, evergreen eyes, yes, yes, naturally. If God had looked at Silas and seen a king, Vesper didn’t think much of God’s imagination. There was something especially dashing about him today.

“This suit is a vast improvement on your usual rags,” Vesper said. “New tailor? I hope you had the old one hanged, the job he was doing.”

“That’s more in your line, isn’t it? And it’s a new wife. She has taken in interest in my image.”

“Smart woman,” said Vesper. Then, “Silas?”

“What is it?”

“Do my people know what’s become of me?”

“ _Your_ people?”

“Let’s not quibble over pronouns. What did you tell them?”

“The truth: that you’ve been interred.”

“Along with the good I’ve done?”

“What good?”

“More quibbling. You’re a sore winner, my dear, has anyone ever told you that?”

“Does it count as winning, I wonder, when an embittered nation hands itself over to escape the tyranny of its king?”

Vesper folded his hands on the table before him and let the question hang. Eventually, he said, “So the world thinks I’m dead, does it.”

“You are dead, Vesper. Get used to it.”

“And my family?”

“Things happen in wars.”

“What does that mean?”

“The Carmelites were not kind to your palace, or its occupants. Well, there’s nothing surprising about that. Do you need a moment?”

Vesper lurched to his feet and grabbed Silas by the lapels of his slick new suit. Together they reeled and listed around the room, scuffling briefly. Silas only dodged Vesper's wild punches impassively, giving Vesper the sense that he was a kitten trying to irritate an especially patient lion. His strength and his anger alike were fading quickly, leaving him sagging and defeated. The pain in his side was unbearable. When Silas's escort burst in, guns raised, their master only said, "Don't come unless you're called. I can handle him." They backed out, clearly uncertain. Silas caught Vesper under his arms and said, “This is embarrassing. I think you had better sit down.”

There was nothing for it but to let Silas lead him back to the table. Vesper suspected he wouldn’t have been able to walk without the support. Silas dropped him into his chair and remained standing at his side, one hand still holding Vesper up by the scruff of his neck.

“Did that make you feel better?”

“Why don’t you just kill me?” Vesper asked. “This is beginning to look like an exercise in sadism.”

“Perhaps it is. Who’s to say?” Silas leaned closer, speaking hardly above a whisper. “Perhaps I want you to suffer. There’s a kind of poetry in this entombment I’ve arranged for you that I trust you’ll grow to appreciate. I’ve realized it’s easy not to have doubts or regrets when there’s forever another protest to be put down, another irksome senator to be neutralized, but with all your new free time, you can remember all the things you’ve done. All the lives you’ve ruined, the people you’ve killed. Like my delegation.”

“Your spies, you mean,” Vesper muttered.

Silas released him with a shove and began pacing the cell. “You had no proof of that when you had them slaughtered.”

“Proof! I knew. I was right, wasn’t I? For a week I feasted you like my own bosom friend, listening to your pretty words and empty promises, and all the while you and your precious delegation were sneaking out into my city, turning my subjects against me. Those traitors devoured my country from the inside out.”

“Credit where it’s due, Vesper. You did a fine job of turning them against you all by yourself. The sole task remaining to us was putting the pieces together.”

“I was a good king to them. A strong king.”

“You were mad with your own power and too blind to see the change sweeping in right under your nose. If I hadn’t seized the opportunity to topple you, your end wouldn’t have been long in coming at the hands of the first demagogue with a sense of history. I only saved everyone some trouble.”

There was an odd current running under Silas’s words that had been eluding Vesper for several minutes, but he thought he had grasped it now, and it rekindled his dimming fury.

“Is this what I’m here for?” he asked, trying to keep his tone mild. “You’ve let me live so you could have a captive audience for your harangues and fits of melancholy? Yes, that’s it exactly. Look at you. How long have you been on your throne -- two months? Three? You’re starting to feel the pressure. You need to unwind, but who can you go to? Not your advisors -- it’s early days, it would never do for them to see a crack in your demeanor. Not that new wife of yours -- not with that brother of hers. What’s a man to do? Oh, yes, of course: here’s poor, broken Vesper Abaddon. You’ve stolen his country and his freedom, but he’s still the only man in this pile of rubble God has set you up to rule who you can hold a worthwhile conversation with. Is that it?”

Silas said nothing. He stopped his pacing in front of the door.

“Well, you can forget it. I’ll kill myself before I become your confessor.”

The deep shudder of Silas’s breathing carried clearly across the quiet cell. He turned to the door and stared at it as he spoke. “We wouldn’t want that.”

“Wouldn’t we.”

“If the thought of my visits is so distressing to you, Vesper, of course I have no intention of continuing . You shall have no visitors. You shall speak with no one. The guards here have been ordered not to speak to you. You may communicate any special requests to them at mealtimes, and if I find them reasonable, I may allow them to be fulfilled.”

“Self-denial doesn’t suit you, Silas.”

“Quiet. I won’t force my presence on you for another moment. Goodbye, Vesper. I hope death will suit you.”

He knocked lightly on the door, and it opened for him. Then he was gone.

Vesper felt triumphant at first. He had hit a nerve. Silas had been rattled. There was no reason to take his threats seriously. He would visit again. He would realize, if he hadn’t already, that the coffers of Carmel were empty, and not even blessed Silas was free from greed. He would come back. He had to.

The triumph lasted a month, or three weeks, or five. There was no way to tell how accurate his time-keeping was, and he had been slipping. There was no reason to be precise. Nothing had changed, except that his ribs were nearly healed, and he had recovered some of his strength. That made the rest worse. Time was an agony, a constant punishment. He had requested paper and pen, and books, a week or two ago, but nothing had turned up. The resources of his own mind were exhausted. And there was no triumph now For the sake of a paltry victory, he had guaranteed defeat in the war for his sanity.


End file.
